Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Or, at least, that was the plan. This morning Chris was due to deliver a new speech to the IPPR. In this speech he was going to tell his audience there was something wrong with people employing Polish workers after all. Very wrong.

Next and Tesco were doing it, and were examples of "unscrupulous employers", he was going to say. The precise phrase British jobs for British workers wouldn’t have been used. Instead, Labour’s shadow home affairs minister was going to say: “It is unfair that unscrupulous employers whose only interest seems to be finding labour as cheaply as possible will recruit workers in large numbers in low-wage countries in the EU, bring them to the UK, charge the costs of their travel and their substandard accommodation against their wages and still not even meet the national minimum wage. That is unfair. It exploits migrant workers and it makes it impossible for settled workers with mortgages and a family to support at British prices to compete.” To re-emphasise; Ed Miliband is not demanding British jobs for British workers. He’s just demanding British workers for British jobs.

Over the past couple of weeks many commentators have been criticising Labour’s summer radio silence. “The opposition look oddly lethargic,” wrote the New Statesman’s Rafael Behr. “Most Labour people I have spoken to wonder why their party has given up politics for the summer.” Those people need look no further than Chris Bryant. Whatever problems may be created by Labour ceding the news cycle to their political opponents, they’re nothing compared to the problems created when Miliband and his team actually start saying things.

Whatever eventually turns out to be in it, Bryant’s IPPR speech won’t be a speech at all. It will instead be a leather-embossed case study of everything that’s currently wrong with the Labour party.

As we’ve seen, Bryant was scheduled to begin by implying Tesco and Next aren’t paying the minimum wage. In fact the companies have confirmed that they are paying above the minimum wage. He was also going to claim the companies are using Polish workers to avoid Agency Workers Regulations. Except the companies have pointed out that their employees are not in any way exempt from those regulations. He also planned to say Tesco had moved one of its distribution centres to Kent, enabling it to employ workers predominantly from “the Eastern Bloc”. Until Tesco pointed out that they don’t even have a distribution centre in Kent. They might have added the “Eastern Bloc” doesn’t exist any more either.

The fact that Bryant’s intended speech was a factual car crash is only part of the problem. It’s clear that it was also a direct – and panicked – response to the dawning realisation that political momentum is shifting towards the Conservatives. You can almost hear the internal discussions: “We’re getting a kicking! We need something, anything!” “How about some rubbish on immigration? Immigration always gets column inches.” “Perfect. But Ed can’t do it. We need some other sap who’s prepared to take a fall peddling this crap.”

Chris Bryant is that sap. Ed Miliband wants the voters to think he’s peddling a tough line on immigration. But Ed Miliband is also nervous of his party realising that he wants the voters to think he’s peddling a tough line on immigration. So he’s insisted that the whole thing be dressed up as an anti-capitalist line instead. Say that the foreigners are coming over here taking our jobs and the Left howls. Say that the foreigners are being exploited by nasty corporates and the Left nods sagely. The result is that all the public see is an incoherent mess, as Labour launches an abortive class war against the people who sell them their bananas.

It almost feels like an afterthought to point out that there is also a huge intellectual, as well as narrative, inconsistency in Labour’s shambolic messaging. Which is presumably why no one in Labour’s ranks batted an eyelid at the fact their party was planning to simultaneously attack companies for employing foreign workers during summer employment peaks, while simultaneously attacking zero hour contracts.

But to be honest, the worst thing about the only speech in British political history to be attacked live on air by the politician actually delivering it wasn’t its lack of basic coherence. It was its hypocrisy.

Ed Miliband and his party are dog-whistling on immigration. Which is fine on one level; I’m all for a bit of crude political populism. But apparently, there’s a whole other section of Bryant’s speech in which he attacks David Cameron for dog-whistling on immigration. Specifically – and obviously his speech has become something of a movable feast – he was planning to attack the Home office’s immigration ad vans. Which is also fine; I attacked them myself last week. But Labour aren’t attacking Cameron’s posturing on migration because they think it’s wrong. It’s because they want to do their own posturing.

Miliband knows his party won’t let him get away with a van. So he’s wheeled out his Ad Bryant instead. The Ad Bryant’s job is to trundle around the radio and TV studios telling people Labour will get medieval with those sinister "Easterners" who have the cheek to come over here and try to nick our livelihoods as shelf-stackers. Or it was, until the Ad Bryant suffered some sort of breakdown, and started getting all medieval on itself.

Ed Miliband returned from holiday today. Some people continue to insist that in 20 months' time he and Chris Bryant will be running the country. I think those people need a holiday themselves.